What are the different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to poverty reduction? What are the strengths and limitations of such approaches for achieving deep and durable outcomes? Mark Cabaj interviews Eric Leviten-Reid about a new paper exploring these questions.
Learning Objectives:
To explore the different ways in which comprehensive strategies can be conceived and enacted.
To consider the possible strengths and limitations of these different approaches, especially with respect to their potential for achieving deep and durable impacts
Eric Leviten-Reid - Eric Leviten-Reid is the Learning and Evaluation Coordinator for the national Vibrant Communities initiative. He works for the Tamarack Institute and is a part-time community development researcher and consultant. Eric has nearly 25 years experience as a researcher and practitioner in the field of community development with a special focus on comprehensive, collaborative approaches to complex issues.
Mark Cabaj - Mark Cabaj is the lead coach at Tamarack and Vibrant Communities, working with foundations, all levels of government, voluntary organizations and businesses to assist them with their specific community engagement efforts.
Mark first cut his teeth on community building with Human Resources Development Canada and Aboriginal groups in rural Alberta. In the early 1990s, he served as the Foreign Assistance Coordinator for Grants in Poland’s Ministry of Privatization and Mission Coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme’s first regional economic development initiative in Eastern Europe. Read more here.
Eric began by pointing out that poverty is a problem made up of multiple and interrelated factors, so poverty reduction strategies need to address a wide range of factors simultaneously. Reliable transportation, careful family budgeting, effective parenting, and effective schooling are not enough when each is achieved in isolation from the rest. Comprehensive community initiatives operate from the premise that joined up problems require joined up solutions.
What distinguishes a complex problem like poverty from ‘simple’ or ‘complicated’ problems is not the number of elements involved but the dynamic relationship among those elements. The various factors involved are constantly shaping and re-shaping one another and the overall nature of the problem. In the same way, a wide range of participants, each involved with different parts of the problem, need to continuously adjust and re-adjust how they affect one another through the decisions and actions they take.
Around the challenges facing a particular place (whether that is a neighbourhood, a city or a city region),
Around the challenges facing a particular demographic group (youth, recent immigrants, the working poor) and
Around the challenges involved with a particular substantive issue (e.g., employment, homelessness, education).
In this clip, Eric talks about two other ways that communities have organized their work: as practical interventions providing services or resources to individuals or families, or as strategic interventions that are meant to alter systemic and institutional factors.
Eric’s paper describes five challenges for comprehensive community responses to poverty:
The Completeness Challenge – Filling the Gaps
The Coordination Challenge – Improving Links
The Robustness Challenge – Strategic Investment
The Governance Challenge – Collaborative Governance
The Innovation Challenge – Social Innovation
These challenges are distinct but often manifest themselves at the same time.
Here Eric explains how these challenges work together and are nested inside each other, like the layers of an onion.
The Robustness Challenge
Sometimes, interventions exist and are even linked up, but lack the resources they need to be effective.
In this clip, Eric talks about two ways to improve interventions, by scaling them up, or by providing supports to help them go deeper.
The Governance Challenge
Complex problems such as poverty are not static, but involve a wide range of interacting factors that continuously re-shape the specific challenges involved.
In this clip, Eric talks about how governance structures in comprehensive community initiatives need to manage changing relationships.
The Innovation Challenge
Although social environments are not static, dominant ways of thinking and acting tend to limit the range of possibilities that may be considered. Poverty can be perpetuated by certain patterns of social and economic life. Social innovation can open up new possibilities.
Here, Eric talks about recognizing and dislodging the underlying arrangements to open space for new relationships.
The Completeness Challenge
Completeness means ensuring the most important strategies are included or identifying the gaps.
Here, Eric gives examples of how “completeness” might apply to groups like the working poor or recent immigrants, or at a systems level.
The Coordination Challenge
This challenge asks if the pieces are effectively linked – if the whole system is working as well as it could.
In this clip, Eric shows how coordination can help families and individuals access the services in the sequence and combinations they need.
Comprehensive Strategies for Deep & Durable Outcomes –What are the different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to poverty reduction? What are the strengths and limitations of such approaches in achieving deep and durable outcomes?
Comprehensive Community Initiatives – In this paper, the Caledon Institute provides an overview of the key ideas associated with comprehensive community initiatives.
Core Principles of Comprehensiveness& Community Building – In Chapter Two from Voicesfrom the Field II, the Aspen Roundtable reflects on the core principles of comprehensive community initiatives after 10 years of practical experience across the US.
Reflecting on Vibrant Communities (2002-2006) – This paper identifies lessons learned from the Vibrant Communities ‘chapter one’ and raises questions to be explored in ‘chapter two.’
Compendium of Poverty Reduction Strategies & Frameworks – An extensive listing of the specific types of strategies that communities use to reduce poverty as well as examples of frameworks in which various of these strategies are combined.
Understanding Poverty as a Complex Problem - This paper explores the nature of complex problems and the implications for poverty reduction initiatives. Link coming soon!
What are the different ways to pursue comprehensive approaches to poverty reduction? What are the strengths and limitations of such approaches for achieving deep and durable outcomes? Mark Cabaj interviews Eric Leviten-Reid about a new paper exploring these questions.
Eric Leviten-Reid - Eric Leviten-Reid is the Learning and Evaluation Coordinator for the national Vibrant Communities initiative. He works for the Tamarack Institute and is a part-time community development researcher and consultant. Eric has nearly 25 years experience as a researcher and practitioner in the field of community development with a special focus on comprehensive, collaborative approaches to complex issues.
Mark Cabaj - Mark Cabaj is the lead coach at Tamarack and 
